Renewable energy could provide 80% of US electricity – but at what cost?

The United States could be getting 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050 and all it would take is doubling the pace for installing renewable energy sources and then doubling it again and somewhere between $320 billion and $1 trillion – on top of a baseline $4 trillion in investments.

Of course, the costs and the pace of renewable energy will depend upon the demands for power and the rate of technological change for wind, solar and geothermal power.

Those, in a gross over-simplification, are the findings of the “Renewable Electricity Futures Study” – a monumental, four-volume, 865-page opus – by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden.

The “80 percent by 2050” made a little bit of a pop in the news, but reporters moved on pretty quickly, for truth told, this study wasn’t written for journalists but policymakers.

The report is an intricate assembly of scenarios: low-demand, high-demand, 30 percent renewable energy to 90 percent renewable. Even the central 80 percent scenario comes in three flavors – no technological improvement, incremental improvement and evolutionary technology – under three different transmission scenarios.
There isn’t a conclusion. There isn’t a bottom line. That makes it hard on journalists. But at least one intrepid reporter has journeyed into the tall grass – though in the spirit of full disclosure he did zip through Volume 4 “Bulk Electric Power System: Operations and Transmission” just to see who did it.

And here’s what I’ve gleaned:

Even if nothing much is done and no new policies enacted – based on the campaign’s policy document I’ll call this the Mitt option – renewable energy will grow from 12 percent of power supply in 2010 to 20 percent in 2050.

“High levels of renewable electricity penetration in the United States would be demanding but achievable,” the report notes and adds the caveat that “any of the scenarios will depend on the decisions made over the next 40 year.”

To get to 80 percent will require doubling and then quadrupling the installation rate of renewable capacity – adding 20 GW a year for the next 20 years and then 45 GW a year to 2050. That compares with 11 GW of renewable capacity installed in 2009 and 7 GW in 2010.

Of the many variables in the study the one that stood out as having the biggest cost impacts was the rate of technological change. “What drives the incremental costs is technology,” Trieu Mai, one of the report’s authors said in an interview. “The other costs have a small effect compared to technology drivers.”

Under one “no technological improvement scenario” for 80 percent renewable the costs to the electric sector would be $1 trillion. Under the same “evolutionary technology” scenario costs would be $320 billion.

The cost of solar and wind power have been dropping and in some cases wind is already competitive with fossil fuel generation, so the “no improvement scenario” is probably overly conservative. The middle “incremental” technology improvement scenario estimates a cost of $870 billion.

The average annual investment required for this new transmission infrastructure, along with interconnections, ranged from $5.7 billion to $8.4 billion a year from 2011 through 2050. Between 1995 and 2008 the U.S. utility industry was spending $2 billion to $9 billion a year – just a little lower that the projected range.

The impact on electricity rates varies with the scenarios but the range is $130 to $161 a megawatt-hour compared with a average business-as-usual baseline rate of $111 – on the low end a 21 percent increase to transform the nation’s electricity system.

The average household uses about 700 kilowatt-hours a month so if that cost was passed on it translates into an extra $13.30 on the monthly bill. At the upper end it is a consumer-unfriendly $35 extra a month.

As to what renewable energy technologies are deployed – it depends upon the scenario, stop me if I’ve said that before.

Generally, wind power gets the biggest deployment, followed by hydropower, biomass and solar. If the demand for electricity – which has been flat since the recession – ramps up the use a solar jumps.

In the scenario with incremental improvement in renewable energy technology, wind energy supply is significant in most regions, but was most prominent in the Great Plains, Great Lakes, Central, Northwest, and Mid-Atlantic regions. Solar energy was found to deploy most substantially in the Southwest, dominated by utility-scale concentration solar technology, followed by California and Texas, with photovoltaics as well as concentrating solar, and then by Florida and the Southeast region. Biomass supply would be most significant in the Great Plains, Great Lakes, Central, and Southeast region.

• That it will take construction of renewable energy facilities at a pace far beyond that the county has seen to get to 80 percent – and it will be a lot easier if demand for electricity starts growing again.

• That the cost of the transition will depend most on the pace of improvements in renewable energy technologies – but at the low-end with little technology innovation and low growth in electricity demand it becomes a much more expensive proposition to get to 80 percent.

• What renewable energy resources would be deployed will vary region to region.

One element I haven’t gone into here is the some of the analysis of how the electricity system manages such high levels of renewable energy, which in cases such as wind and solar, are intermittent. Volume II of the study looks at storage technologies – perhaps for another day.

“We really focused on the technical issues of integrating that much renewable energy,” NREL’s Mai said. “If you are going to transform the power sector it is going to cost something over doing nothing. But that wasn’t the focus so, perhaps our cost projections are less optimistic.”

There are also some eye-opening numbers on cost and performance of different types of generation in a support study, but those are definitely for a blog post to come. I think any of us who got this far are NRELed out.

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Once “crossover” is reached in solar technologies, which will happen in the next 7-10 years due to new developments which capture the entire light spectrum instead of only the visual light spectrum, and we see the results of rapid Natural Gas production and growth, the US will be in a state of energy abundance instead of energy dependence.

“renewable energy will grow from 12 percent of power supply in 2010 to 20 percent in 2050.”

Just to put some context around those numbers, including biofuels renewables contributed 3% of the total energy consumed in the U.S. in 2011. If you consider only electricity, the number is around 4.5%. Adding in hydropower gives another 7.6%, but hydropower isn’t really growing in the U.S. In recent years, energy from hydropower has been lower than it was in the late 1990’s.

Washington not being honest. Hydo wnr wterwheels couod produce electicity, (electric) heat and hydrogen 90% cheaper than wind and solar. As it is, excess wind, hydro and solar not being usr to generate hydrogen as a supplement to natural gas.

The average household is not a comparison of Apples to Apples but of present usage to future price increase. The average utility rate is 12 cents/kWh for a monthly bill of $84 for 700 kWhs. On the low end $13.30 is an increase of 15.8% and on the high end 41.7%. I live in the desert southwest and use 4,000 kWhs during the summer. That’s an increase of $76/month on the low end to $200/month increase on the high end. These government studies need to based in Reality and not Deception.

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Well, Denmark has committed to 100% renewable energy production by 2050. That’s right, the mother country of the company that’s one of the few bright spots in Colorado’s economy — Vestas — knows it can be done.

It’s a matter of aligning policy with necessary outcomes — easy as pie. Incidentally, Vestas is ready to abandon Colorado and cut back its other US operations drastically if Congress doesn’t decide to continue the Production Tax Credit. Should be a no-brainer, but the GOP-dominated US House of Representatives — like the Colorado House — has decided that blocking clean energy is the way to go. Huh? Those of us who care about our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are duty-bound to enlighten their representatives that clean energy (renewables and efficiency) are the key to a viable long-term future, regardless of party affiliation. Duh.

It is one thing to predict the future but quite another thing to decide what we should be doing today to get the future we want. I would propose a modest tax on carbon to go to a trust fund so Congress cannot piss it away. Use the trust fund to search for the miracles needed to store energy.

Volume 1, page A-30 of this report says that 80% fossil fuel costs less than double that of 10% fossil fuel. In reality, 100% renewable costs far less than 90% renewable. Shame on the NREL for this and missing methane synthesis storage in Volume 2. Terrible work! Please join me in asking the authors for a retraction and correction.

The study also (inadvertently) provides evidence that
renewable energy will be a minority player in humanity’s energy portfolio.

I dug into the same report and came away with a different
take. It confirms that only about 32 percent of our total energy can be
renewable. I.e., renewables are going to need a lot of help from other low
carbon energy sources.

Note how small a role solar plays (around 13%). The lion’s share will be bird
blending wind, river ecosystem destroying hydro, and land usurping biomass
(note that the drought has caused the price of corn and corn ethanol to spike).
The report is about electrical power, not total energy use. A lot of
hydro power will be silted in by the 2050 time frame.

We should stop all the subsidies,secret and open knowledge,for fossil fuels ..we should fine all fossil fuels for environmental damage human and other species death and illnesses…We can all shop less for cheap plastic junkk that does not make us happy and that we do not want 2 minutes after we bring it home..recycle.We should tax fossil fuels for the devestating effects caused by them so far and anticipate massive costs in the future as Oceans rise,dust bowls take over our agricultural center,loss of foersts as firesincrease even more..and devastating flooding costs..

The trouble with the cost evaluations, is that everyone looks at the uncertainties / costs of change – in this case, renewable energies. Yet, there are many uncertainties / costs of no-change. For instance, the maximum cost of change which Mr. Jaffe mentions on the electric bill is a fraction of what we all already experienced at the gas pump, with a 300% increase.

Where is the accounting for the rising costs of fossil fuels? To name but a few: law of offer & demand with BRIC countries on the rise, always deeper & less pure strands of coal, more complex natural gas extraction with high methane releases & water pollution, geo-political costs.
Where is the accounting for the external costs of fossil fuels? Greenhouse gas, water contamination, health consequences, natural disasters ranging from the Gulf’s oil spills to the havocks of global warming. The recent Harvard study published in the NY science Academy magazine shows that the life-cycle cost of coal-generated electricity is many times its current wholesale price. Ignoring these costs will not make them disappear. We will pay for them in the future, either through a steep carbon tax, or, perhaps, a giant world-wide class action lawsuit which will make the tobacco settlements look like peanuts. Where are the costs and risks of no-change???

Emilie Rusch covers retail and commercial real estate for The Post. A Wisconsin native and Mizzou graduate, she moved to Colorado in 2012. Before that, she worked at a small daily newspaper in South Dakota. It's the one with Mount Rushmore.